Established in 1969, Manohar is a publishing house and a bookseller serving individuals and libraries. We export books by mail and have a bookstore at Ansari Road in Delhi.
Manohar initially sold only rare and out of print publications, but soon branched out into local sale/export of new books published in India, and then into publishing of scholarly works under its own imprint.

25 July, 2012

Sikh Ideology, Polity and
Social Order: From Guru Nanak to Maharja Ranjit Singh

By- J.S. Grewal

This book is the fourth
‘incarnation’ of essays published in 1972. A slightly revised edition appeared
in 1982, and an enlarged one in 1996. The present edition is much enlarged and
thoroughly revised.

In many of these essays
the author has analysed contemporary works of history and literature and all
other essays are based strictly on contemporary evidence. In the volume as a
whole Sikh ideology, polity and social order are seen from various perspectives
to illuminate their inter-relationship in all its richness and complexity.

A variety of sources in
Punjabi, Persian and English are used in these essays with reference to the
‘received wisdom’. The volume, thus, is likely to provide the best introduction
to the precolonial Sikh tradition for young researchers. The professional
historians may find it useful for comparison in the light of their own
understanding. The general reader would find it interesting especially as it
brings out the essential significance of several contemporary works of
literature.

Indispensable for the
teachers and students of Sikh history, this book has equal relevance for
scholars of social sciences, religion and literature.

J.S. Grewal
is well known to the scholarly world as the author of a large number of books
and articles on historiography, medieval India, the Punjab region and the Sikh
tradition.

This
important volume is a major contribution to the interface between religion and
law in independent India. This multidisciplinary volume includes essays by
eminent jurists, legal scholars, historians of religions, political scientists
and Sanskritists from India and abroad. This revised and updated edition has
essays on subjects such as the structure of religion and law in India; legal
issues affecting the Sikh community; public endowments; and issues relating to
caste and conversions.

Robert D. Baird is Professor Emeritus History of
Religions, University of lowa. He has also contributed articles in the areas of
methodology and the study of religion, modern Indian religious movements, and
religion and law.

Indian
philosophical thought on Pramana (Valid Cognition) is a rich achieve
that merits attention not only for its technical brilliance and variety but
also for the ways in which it reverberates with contemporary discussions in
science: arguably the ‘master discourse’ of the modern world. In a spirit of
free and open enquiry, characteristic of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s
preferred mode of engaging with the world, Tibet House collaborated with the
Drepung Monastic University at Mundgod, Karnataka to organize a Monastic Debate
that was both traditional and contemporary.

Tibetan Buddhism
has a long tradition of Monastic Debates. This Debate was special in that it
grew upon the pre-Buddhist traditions of thought on this critical question on
Logic while also incorporating a perspective that leapt across the centuries:
that of contemporary Physics. While the different schools such as Vedanta,
Sankhya, Nyayavaisesika, Purvuamimamsa, and Jaina were represented by scholars
from academia, there was a lively interaction with monks being trained in
traditional Tibetan philosophy at monasteries across India.

The seminar was
multilingual – with presentations and queries in Tibetan, Hindi, Sanskrit and
English. While this book presents lightly edited versions of the key papers
presented there, the lively debates in Tibetan could not be transcribed due to
logistical difficulties. Hence, this bi-lingual volume, attempts to make
available to the scholarly community and curious students a valuable resource
for understanding this crucial issue in Logic from a rich, multifaceted,
compariatist perspective.

Lama Daboom
Tulku was born in Tibet in 1941 and recognized as
the incarnation of the previous Doboom Tulku at the age of three by Ven. Lama
Phurchog Jamgon Rinpoche. Since 1981 Lama Daboom Tulku has been Director of
Tibet House, Cultural Centre of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in New Delhi,
working for the promotion of Tibetan cultural heritage to a wide audience. He
is the author of Buddhist Translations: Problems and Perspectives; Buddhist
Path to Enlightenment and Gyalwai Chostsul.

Maya Joshi has inherited an interest in Buddhist studies which she keeps alive
with her active association with Tibet House and the World Buddhist Culture
Trust, of which she is a Trustee. She edits the Tibet House Bulletin and
is on the Faculty of English, Lady Sri Ram College for Women, New Delhi.

The religious
ideal of ecstasy is central to the cross-fertilization between Hinduism and
Islam in South Asia. That is the basic theme of this volume, which explores how
mysticism associated with rapture, ecstasy, eroticism, longing, and suffering
were the human emotions which held the key to knowing the divine in both
Hinduism and Islam. The performing arts (such as dance, music, poetry or the
abstract concept of performativity) offer a potent lens to examine ecstasy and
the ecstatic body.

By foregrounding
the performing body in religious devotion, the essays in this volume reorient
the discourse of the body as it emerged in scholarly disciplines such as
anthropology and sociology. The essays draw from new theoretical research into
the nature and importance of performance in imagining the cultural and
religious life of South Asia.

From a South
Asian perspective, these essays enhance the engagement of performance studies
with the intellectual idea of embodiment. One common thread that ties together
these essays is the linked concepts of sringara-rasa (erotic emotion)
and bhakti (loving devotion). All of them draw from new theoretical
research into the nature and importance of the body through evidence drawn from
architecture, painting, drama, poetry, qawwali singing, dance, yoga, and
religious texts.

Pallabi
Chakravorty teaches kathak dance and academic
courses related to the anthropology of performance in the Department of Music
and Dance at Swarthmore College. Founder and artistic director of Courtyard
Dancers, she is an anthropologist, dancer, choreographer, and cultural worker.

Scott Kugle is a Research Fellow at the Henry Martyn Institute for Research,
Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation in Hyderabad, India, after having
taught for several years in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College.

The essays collected in this book present recent
scholarly thinking about religious texts, beliefs and practices in various
epochs of Indian history. A comprehensive historiographical introduction is
followed by contributions from thirteen scholars who in their different ways
examine the complex relationship between the religious phenomena and their
historical contexts. The collection seeks to explore the history of India’s
religious traditions and cultures through three themes: Texts, Traditions and
Discourse; Divinity and the Feminine and Religious Identities.

By relating the religious processes in Indian
history to such issues as caste and gender, identity and community formation,
and domination and resistance, the essays interrogate many commonly held
assumptions of colonial, nationalist and communal histories in regard to the
issues of religious conflicts, interactions and syncretism.

Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, the
articles in the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of
the history of Indian religious movements and cultures.

Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna: taeches Medieval Indian
History at the Dept. of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Ranjeeta Dutta: teaches Medieval Indian History at
the Dept. of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She was a
fellow at the Indian Inst. of Advanced Study. Shimla from 2009-11.

Farhat Nasreen: teaches Medieval Indian History at
the Dept. of HIstory and Culture, Jamia MIllia Islamai, New Delhi. She has
researched on the Braj region in the medieval period.

This book is an
attempt to analyse the conception of kama in the early-medieval
classical Sanskrit literary tradition from a gender perspective. By reading
against the grain, the author has tried to illuminate the sexual status of
women within the different genres of these classical Sanskrit sources. The book
highlights that far from being a unitary homogeneous category with only a certain
kind of sexual status, women and their sexuality have been conceived
differently in different philosophical schools, be they dharmasastra,
kamasastra, Lokayata, tantric, ayurvedic and the asceptic philosophies.

The author has
further made a case for seeking the prostitute sexuality diiferently from that
of a kulavadhu, i.e. a household woman. The treatment of the sexual
desire of mayavinis, raksasis, dakinis, and svairins too places
them in an all-together different category from the other women of patriarchy..

This book also
argues in favour of the validity of talking in terms of love (prema)
tradition in contra-distinction to an erotic (srngari) tradition in the
classical Sanskrit sources of the early-medieval period. The basis for this
binary division is predicated on the fact that in the love tradition, in which
we include the poetry of the female poets, Bhavabhuti’s and Jayadeva’s work
deals with reciprocity and emotions in the sexual relations between man and
woman, while the masculine erotic tradition authored by the srngari poets
is marked by hegemonic masculinity in which women exist solely as fetishized
objects for exclusively male erotic stimulation.

Shalini Shah is Reader in the Department of History,
Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.

Her publications
include The Making of Womanhood: Gender Relations in the Mahabharata (Manohar
1995). She has also published many research papers in prestigious journals and
edited volumes, focussing on gender relations.

Epic and Argument in Sanskrit
Literary History celebrates the distinguished career of the American
Indologist Robert P. Goldman. The essays on Sanskrit literary history, which
range from the danastuti in the Rgveda (Romila Thapar) to the
transformation of literary theory in ninth century Kashmir (Sheldon Pollock) to
the practice of philology in seventeenth-century Varanasi (Christopher
Minkowski), reflect the wide range of interests of Professor Goldman himself,
and the wide influence he has exerted on the field. Eight of the essays (by
such leading scholars as Greg Bailey, John Brokington, James Fitzgerald, luis
Gonzalez-Reimann, Phyllis Granoff, Alf Hiltebeitel, Adheesh Sathaye, and Sally
Sutherland Goldman), concentrate on the epics and Puranas, and as an ensemble
make for essential reading on the genre of Sanskrit literature to which
Goldman, as editor-in-chief of the Ramayana Translation Project, has
devoted the greater part of his career. The scholarly essays are bookended by
the survey of Professor Goldman’s scholarly contributions (Deven Patel) and a
lively personal reminiscence (Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason).

Sheldon Pollock is
Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University. He is
the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University
Press), and author of, among other books, The Language of the Gods in the
World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University
of California Press). He is currently working on Liberation Philology
(Harvard University) and Reader on Rasa: An Historical Sourcebook in Indian
Aesthetics, for a new series of sourcebooks in classical Indian thought
that he is editing for Columbia University Press. In 2009 he received the
President’s Award for Sanskrit from the Government of India.

A Sufi’s quest
for spiritual identity is distinguishable from the external scholars (‘ulama-i
zahiri), radical reformers, politico-religious activists and average
Muslims whose belief in the fundamentals of Islam in a given religious
environment is simply literal or even superficial in certain cases. Central to
this difference of approach is the Sufi’s life-long concern to conquer his self
for the greater spiritual and ethical good for humankind than the mere
pragmatic and worldly concerns of the ‘ulama in relation to the Shari’ah.

Without
dramatizing divide between Shari’ah and Sufism, unlike Orientalism, this
dictionary intrinsically portrays the abiding contribution of numerous Sufis of
South Asia to Islam and history. Definitive and interpretative, it lends a
certain degree of objectivity to the supernatural role that characterizes the
historical personalities listed in it.

The work is
based on research spanning a period of 27 years, both in India and abroad.
Besides Persian sources, in manuscript and printed form, their Urdu
translations, wherever available, have been used carefully in conjunction with
the original. This dictionary may, then, be the first to provide succinctly and
objectively a fairly comprehensive account of the Sufis, recorded in various
historical sources, in just one volume. The author takes special care to
highlight how certain religious traditions were adapted by the Sufis to the
larger framework of Sufism without violating the Qur’an and the Sunnah.

This work is an
antidote to the tarnished image of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11.

Mohammad
Ishaq Khan is former Professor of History and
Shaikhu’l-‘Alam Chair at Kashmir University. His publications inclue Kashmir’s
Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis (3rd edn. 2003)
and Experiencing Islam (1997).